I’m writing gaming fiction again, and just like last time it’s centering a character that I created while playing DIE. I spoke a bit about my experience over on Cannibal Halfling, but the important thing to know is that it’s a trend. Over my four different experiences playing DIE, three of them I played the primary scenario (‘Reunited’) and three of them led to me creating characters that just tweaked my brain a little, that just broke me a little. Not only has no other game come close to that record, I think only one other game system at all really drove me to think about one of my characters hard enough to want to write about them.

I’m admittedly not of the ‘OC’ generation, my characters are often somewhat mechanistically generated, intended to slot into the campaign at hand thinking more about what the rules are going to allow me to do than what my inner story demands. That does introduce an interesting caveat that, to be honest, I’m sad about: The games that have driven me to want to write more about the characters in them are some of the only games from that narrative school of thinking that someone else in my group has run. Yeah, it turns out that Masks and DIE are some of the only ‘full bore indie’ games someone other than me has run in the group, and that significantly reduces the chances that I’m really being sucked in.

All that said, there are some other things going on here that make DIE a breeding ground for characters worth reinvestigating, and while I’m certainly bullish on the game overall, not all of these are positives in and of themselves. Still, when you think about it, they all come together to make DIE a unique breeding ground for unfinished stories and characters that give you an additional itch that the game can’t scratch.

Teenage melodrama

This is the obvious answer, and it is the one thing that DIE and its closest competitor in the personal inspiration space, Masks, have in common. I’ve discussed this before, but the coming of age story is powerful; there’s a reason that the bildungsroman is such a common story structure in literature. That said, the differences between how Masks and how DIE both brought in their melodrama and how effectively they used said melodrama leads me to believe that the teenage-dom, the coming of age story isn’t it. At the very least, it’s not wholly responsible for what makes DIE so effective.

Masks and DIE do both zero in on the teenage experience in different ways, but both are effective for different reasons. Masks is ultimately a game about identity. Who are you, but also, who do you need to show who you really are? The influence mechanic is a really effective piece of rules writing when it comes to making this idea of having the sum total of your outside, well, influences really determine how things are going to go for you. It’s not much of a forcing function, though; a common throughline across the Masks games I’ve played in is that the PC-PC influence mechanics are left to the side fairly quickly. Some of it is that the mechanics simply aren’t imposed on PC-PC relationships as much (the consent issues implicit in making PC moves as ‘hard’ against PCs as they are against NPCs has haunted the entire PbtA design space since Apocalypse World), and some of it is that I play with a bunch of thirtysomethings who are quite separated from the consistent low-level agony of caring intensely about what someone else thinks of you that comes with adolescence. Even being fully onboard for the teenage experience doesn’t mean we’re going to do a complete job of replicating it.

DIE is more effective at navigating that remove because your character is at that remove once you actually start playing. You don’t have to play a teenager, you’re playing an adult thinking about being a teenager, which is exactly what you at the table are. Easy, right? Similarly, DIE focuses on the parts of growing up which happen to steer your life and color your opinion of it: The hopes, the dreams, and the ambitions. While this focus doesn’t push you to think like a teenager like Masks does, it pushes you to think like an adult thinking about being a teenager. Which you are. And since you already are that thing, allowing bleed into character creation is very, very easy.

That goddamn questionnaire

What is the single best way DIE makes room for you to bleed in? By disclaiming mechanical character creation for the entire introduction of the game. As I mentioned above, I often fall into mechanistic thinking in character creation; DIE does not let you do that because it gives you no mechanics. Instead, you’re worldbuilding your school together, and then answering piercing questions about your friends, your crushes, your hopes and dreams. It’s very clever how specific the questions get without giving a lot of narrowing tools. RPG character creation is often intended to get you to pick a bucket based on how you want to engage with the mechanics and the setting, but DIE doesn’t do that (at least not directly), instead asking big questions and in some cases asking everyone the same questions. Where the hell are you going to get ideas on how to answer these questions? Your own high school experiences, of course. In any other game the ‘correct’ structure for character creation would be to leave as little ambiguity as possible, in DIE every big ambiguous question implies an opportunity to fill in blanks with the one character of this archetype you know best, yourself.

One thing that’s fascinating about the DIE character creation questionnaire is that it’s exactly the right length. Go much longer and character creation starts to drag, but much shorter and you don’t create the necessary space to make someone you end up relating to. I found out about the long side by writing my own version for the last game I ran, and as far as short is concerned, most of the scenarios err on the side of shorter questionnaires and in my opinion suffer for it. There’s something really visceral about forcing your players to essentially adventure through their characters’ own decisions, and every DIE scenario I’ve played which gets away from that doesn’t hit as hard as those that do. It’s one reason that the ‘Bizarre Love Triangles’ scenario is on my to-run list: Romantic entanglement is one of the few decision deposits that seems as rich to mine as adolescence.

That said, DIE isn’t really about adolescence, it’s about who you become in comparison to who you thought you would be when you were younger. That becoming is, incidentally, absent from the game; if you want one big reason I think DIE invites me to write stories, that’s probably it.

The offscreen ‘break’

The focal point of character creation for DIE’s ‘Reunited’ scenario is a set of “Big Questions”. Each of these questions frames the most important thing in the adolescent character’s life, be that something present or an anticipated future. After answering the first part of each “Big Question”, you later return and are asked to explain how it all went wrong. The best thing in your life is gone, your dream has gone unfulfilled, or some other thing in your life has gone wrong. The answers to the two halves of the “Big Question” define the tension of your character that they carry into DIE, and in an ideal world should form the conflict that the Master picks at to make the character consider staying in DIE. It’s also something which, barring the literal answering of the question during character creation, happens completely offstage.

Over the years I’ve been taught a simple axiom about creating a character for an RPG: The most interesting things that happen to that character should happen at the table, not in the pages of backstory. It’s a simple and effective rule that helps you both to write to the power level of the campaign as well as write a character who is motivated to join in the campaign at hand. DIE very deliberately violates this rule, though in a way that’s very clever. In the real world, every character has a big thing that happens which is revealed in character creation and then simply set aside along with the other key elements that you introduce in the first segment. That thing is inviolable, but is also the source of most endogenous conflict in that character’s life. Once the characters head into DIE, they’re forced to face these conflicts head on as metaphors for their struggles become, among other things, literal monsters.

My group has had trouble establishing a really thorny conflict in the vote to return home from DIE. Across every game we’ve played, there’s either one holdout or it ends up being a unanimous vote. DIE as a new reality isn’t built up enough to seem like a fair alternative, and part of that is simply that we tend to play in single sittings, condensed bursts where even if we take enough time to play three or so sessions we’re not really letting the other world breathe. To be fair, this is something established in the comic: Even though the characters see DIE as real, they constantly have trouble treating it as a real world held to the same moral significance as their own. It’s a fascinating and troubling conflict in the comic, but it tends to short circuit the tension of a key element of the RPG’s scenario. What that ultimately means, though, is that the characters have a desire to return to the world where the core tension of their life so far still exists. The fruitful void of that tension persists after the game is done, and that right there is an obvious inspiration for further investigation.

DIE is far from the only RPG where I can create interesting characters worth examining closer. What makes DIE such a font for fiction, though, has to be this void around each character’s central conflict. The thing which drives each character is described through two questionnaire answers and then never directly revisited. How could you not want to look into that time period, the one character creation tells you almost nothing about?

To be fair, that was not exactly what inspired my first piece of DIE fiction. My main group’s first game of DIE ended up hyperfocusing on one questionnaire item: “Who did your gaming group fear the most?” The NPC who was the answer to that question, Gracie, ended up playing a pivotal role in that first game, up to getting a false Dictator die which sent the final conflict spiraling. Of course, I wrote a character who simultaneously had little reason to ‘fear’ Gracie in the high school context while fearing her greatly in the game context. Why was that? That ‘why’ was what led me to write Lenny’s Halloween Party, which helped establish (for me at least) exactly where my character Donnie fell in this whole thing and why Gracie was so primary for him (as opposed to Seamus’s character Jason and Dan’s character Antonio who both had closer and much more direct relationships with Gracie). The important point, though, is that the information which created a central conflict in our game was sparse enough to make me want to plumb it further.

My next piece of DIE fiction is also going to be focused on learning more about one of my characters, though from two angles. I find that there is so much scaffolding put up by the DIE questionnaire, so many elements that really make your characters feel more human, more real…though of course part of that is how the game encourages you to, for a lack of a better analogy, bleed all over the page. The bleed is of course one of the reasons I keep going back to these characters; the fiction is much more gratifying because as I write and find out about them, I’m also finding out about myself.

Beyond the fiction, it should be no surprise I’m looking for more games that are as emotionally affecting as DIE. I do think bleed has to be part of it; taking someone along on a sad journey can be affecting but it doesn’t usually trouble you and make you think as much as something which forces you to throw a part of yourself out to the table in the process. I’m less certain how to evoke that sort of bleed in a mainline game; portal fantasy like DIE is an obvious way to work in a “real life” version of the character, but getting real portal fantasy out of DIE takes a lot of work and some willingness to write characters so far gone that they don’t want to go home, something my group has had trouble doing.

Another perhaps secondary reason I want to keep writing fiction about my DIE characters is the meta reason. DIE hits me straight in the chest every time, and frankly I want more. Writing about these characters and reflecting on what is dragging the feels out of me is one of the ways I figure out how to find the next big game that has the same impact. Some of it is figuring out what to look for, but honestly some of it is figuring out how to let go and just bleed a bit. By writing on these characters and spending more time in their heads, I get more practice spending time in the head of all of my characters, and that in turn helps me find what I’m really looking for out of some of these games. Needless to say, I have a lot more writing to do.